Danske Gymnasier – 1 March, 2017
I’ve been asked to speak about the jobs of tomorrow.
… what jobs? … suppose there are no jobs? That may sound absurd but
if you believe some very authoritative research coming out of the US and
Europe you have to acknowledge that in talking about future
employment, not just for our young people in prosperous Europe but for
young people throughout the world, we have to be careful about the
assumptions we make. Driverless taxis and trucks; robots that do the
housework; these may just be the tip of a very large iceberg.
I thought it would be appropriate to start with a quotation from a group of
radical educationalists in the UK, most of whom used to work for our
Dept for Education but have now set themselves up as an independent
body to work with and support head teachers and schools that are rethinking and re-designing much of what they do to make it more relevant
to their students. Rather than identifying their task as getting young
people ready for the labour market, they state their mission as
“To focus on preparing young people to live well in a future that is
uncertain”
That seems a very sensible place to start a conversation about jobs as we
move into the 4th Industrial revolution.
If you’re not familiar with the term, it derives from an assumption that
we’ve already had 3 industrial revolutions
- The first was about mechanisation and was driven by steam
- The second was about mass production and was driven by electricity
- The third was about digitisation and driven by computers
- The fourth, in the words of Klaus Shaub, the founder of the World
Economic Forum in Davos, represents “the shift from simple digitation
(i.e. the 3rd revolution) to innovation based on combinations of
technologies that are blurring the lines between physical, digital and
biological spheres”
To talk about a blurring of the physical, digital and biological spheres
sounds like alarmist science fiction – as if we’re in danger of losing our
identity as humans.
What we do know is that it is a massive step-change, and it’s coming fast.
Automation and digitisation are familiar – the production line run by
robots; the ATM cash dispenser at the bank that has replaced the bank
clerk; the infuriating automated check-out in the supermarket that usually
goes wrong. These things have all had an impact on low-skill jobs but
they are very much of the 3rd, not the 4th industrial revolution.
A report by Merrill Lynch for the Bank of America in 2015 suggested
that 47% of all US jobs are at risk of being replaced by Artificial
Intelligence and robotisation over the next 20 years. An Oxford
University study in the UK estimated 35% of British jobs were similarly
at risk – that’s 15 million people. A separate Bank of England study
came up with almost identical results. This is change on an altogether
different scale from anything we are experiencing today.
The Bank of America report states the obvious - it says “one major risk
is the potential for increasing labour market polarisation, especially for
low-paying jobs such as service occupations”. We are already seeing that
process.
The Chief economist at the Bank of England commented, “Technology
appears to be resulting in faster, wider and deeper degrees of hollowing
out than in the past. Why? Because 20th century machines have
substituted not just for manual human tasks, but cognitive ones too. The
set of human skills that machines can reproduce, at lower cost, has both
widened and deepened. The space remaining for uniquely human skills
could shrink further”. I heard the senior executive of a vehicle
manufacturer talking recently about production line robots that can work
30 hours continuously unsupervised – and never ask for a pay rise.
What struck me most forcibly in reading about the Bank of America
study was an economist who said - “We are in danger, for the first time in
human history, of creating a large number of people who are not needed”.
That extraordinary statement raises some interesting questions about the
future. Who else is not needed? Some of the most prominent
personalities in the world today – in sport and entertainment and the
media – none of them are needed. Most people working in the arts and
cultural sector are “not needed” in that sense. But that doesn’t mean they
are worthless or unemployable or unimportant.
Preparing young people to face a future in which they may not be needed
or feel they are not needed is not the same as telling them they are
worthless – but it requires a big mind-shift.
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Of course there are already plenty of young people who already feel they
are not needed – and do feel worthless. A study of employment trends in
the Middle East and North Africa showed that where youth
unemployment was 25% in 2011, it had risen to an appalling 30% by
2016 – more than twice the global average. And remember that in some
of these countries 50% of the population is under 20. Apart from the
human cost of such waste, there is an added social cost in societies where
having a job is virtually a pre-condition for getting married and a further
unquantifiable cost in that many of the survey’s respondents expressed
the view that unemployment was the greatest single driver in the
radicalisation of young men. And isn’t that an entirely logical response
to feeling that one is ‘not needed’?
My point is the impact of unemployment, and specifically unemployment
driven by technology change, is global. Economists say that the
phenomenon of ‘reshoring’ - in other words, bringing back to our
European and western economies the manufacturing jobs that we have
been outsourcing to East Asia for the last 20 years, is generally driven by
the falling costs of automated production and is likely to have minimal
impact on our own employment figures. The accepted figures are that
offshoring manufacturing to low-cost, low-regulation economies saves
around 65% of labour costs but replacing human workers with robots can
save 90%. Jobs are lost in the East but are not balanced by new jobs
being created in the West.
In fact, the whole notion of productivity in our economies – and
productivity is a notion that obsesses most governments - is essentially a
measure of how human beings – argumentative, expensive and unreliable
as most of us are – can be replaced by machines that are more reliable,
more compliant and, in the long run, cheaper. Workers at McDonalds
restaurants in the US who demonstrated outside the company
headquarters for a minimum wage of $15 an hour were told by one of the
company’s senior executives that they could forget their pay demand –
and their jobs – because the company would shortly introduce an
automated burger flipper whose cost was a fraction of their wages.
As labour costs rise everywhere in the world the pressure for productivity
in order to remain competitive will only increase, driving up the use of
technology and driving down the need for human labour.
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At the same time the UN’s International Labour Organisation estimates
that the global economy needs to be generating 40m jobs a year, which,
as they say is, needed “not just to enable people to earn a living but to
give life meaning and purpose”.
None of these equations appear to add up.
But perhaps this is all ridiculously apocalyptic. Each of the first 3
industrial revolutions was accompanied by doom-laden prophecies of
social collapse and misery but, in varying degrees, each has driven
prosperity and liberated hundreds of millions of people from drudgery.
And each revolution has generated millions of jobs in fields that
previously did not exist. Why should the 4th industrial revolution be any
different?
After all, every utopian vision of the last 200 years has painted a picture
of societies liberated from work altogether, able to enjoy life, learning
and leisure. Even as hard headed an economist as JM Keynes said in the
1930s that he believed by the end of the 20th century a 15-hour working
week could be the norm for most workers in the western world. Now it
appears we may be on the brink of a world in which we really can claim
to have swept away the need for any human being to do dangerous,
degrading or repetitive work. Should we not be welcoming this new age
with open arms?
Perhaps we should. Perhaps we will. A survey of industry experts in the
US revealed an absolute split – 48% were techno-pessimists who believe
that “robots and AI will have a massive detrimental impact on society,
with digital agents displacing both blue-collar and white-collar jobs”
while 52% thought that “human ingenuity will `overcome and create new
jobs and industries.”
But there are some aspects of this coming revolution which do appear to
be genuinely uncharted territory for the human race. I go back to Klaus
Schaub’s definition of it as “the shift from simple digitisation to
innovation based on combinations of technologies that are blurring the
lines between physical, digital and biological spheres”
These massive changes that are are driven by science and technology,
not just in the field of artificial intelligence but in every aspect of our
lives. Boundaries are being pushed in a way that is without precedent in
human history.
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That’s true, whatever branch of the sciences you care to look at – from
particle physics to astro-physics, from neurology to our unravelling of the
genetic code, from climate science to our understanding of the evolution
of life, from artificial intelligence to the use of data, and perhaps most of
all to the exploration of core aspects of our nature – physiologically and
psychologically.
And, driven by the advances of science, technology is changing just as
fast - transforming our economy, our homes, our relationships, our
learning, our lives. You only have to look at the impact that social media
has had on politics throughout the world in the last 2 or 3 years to
understand that. It’s opening up unprecedented opportunities while also
posing unprecedented challenges and questions.
But where science has nearly always been a force for enlightenment and
liberation, technology can be a tyrant. Left unchecked it can produce
unintended consequences that can be as catastrophic as they can be
beneficial. Think, for example, of what has happened in the financial
sector where fantastically complex algorithms and computer-driven credit
swaps produced a banking system that was, literally, no longer entirely
under the control of humans, a system that certainly lost all connection
with the needs of people or the needs of the real economy and instead
became a manic game for the benefit of a very small number of bankers
at the expense of a very large number of their customers.
Left to itself technology is value-free. If it is to work to our benefit it
needs a force that will humanise it, socialise it, provide an ethical
framework for its power. It needs a counterbalance and that
counterbalance is our culture. Technology only deals with the external
world. Culture links that external world to our own internal worlds; links
the social with the personal; links the past with the present.
Which brings us to education.
To ask if we have education systems that prepare young people for jobs is
not good enough – it never has been, but it is even more inadequate
today. In the words I quoted at the beginning, before we get to thinking
about jobs, we need education systems that prepare young people to live
well in a world of uncertainty in which conventional jobs may be hard to
find and hold; a world in which they have the cultural assets to be able to
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give “meaning and purpose” to their lives even if, in an economist’s
view, they are “not needed”.
That seems to me the right context in which to discuss jobs of tomorrow.
But let’s stick with education for a moment. I’m not an educationalist
and I’m not for a moment trying to dump all the problems of the world
into the lap of school-teachers, though most of us like to do so.
But what part is education playing in preparing young people for this
uncertain future and in helping us develop a sense of common culture that
can be a dynamic and effective counterweight to the massive power of
technology?
Most of the world’s education systems seem to be in state of total denial.
As we get into the 4th industrial revolution they are still operating with a
manual that was, in all its essentials, created to serve the first and second
industrial revolutions – revolutions that called for a disciplined and
compliant workforce, acquiring a set body of knowledge that could be
easily tested and measured against the work of other students and even
other generations.
When all employers are crying out for workers who have the social skills
and attitudes that encourage team working, how do we still have a school
system where collaboration is described as cheating?
When the most successful companies in Silicon Valley describe failure as
‘work in progress’ how do we still have a school system where failure is
a badge of shame?
And when one of the world’s most successful IT businesses tells its
workforce “it is better to ask forgiveness than seek permission” – in other
words don’t wait for your boss to tell you can do something, just do it –
how can we have a school system where seeking permission is a precondition of going to the toilet.
Most of all, when the tablet and smart phone provide a door to all the
world’s knowledge, surely we need to re-think the relationship between
the online world, the school and the teacher? Recently, and after much
lobbying, computer coding has been introduced to the secondary school
curriculum in England on the basis that without it we were, in effect,
teaching children how to read in the digital world, but not how to write.
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You’ll be familiar with these arguments and I’m sure some of you find
many of them simplistic and annoying. Unfortunately they remain
substantially true. We are doing students a terrible disservice.
Perhaps I am painting an extreme picture; - I’m aware there are schools
and teachers in every part of the world that inspire and stimulate their
students in wonderfully imaginative ways. But in most systems in the
world that is happening in spite of rather than because of the basic
structure of the system.
Nor am I dismissing the need for academic learning, the need for rigour
and assessment, the need to give young people a solid grounding in the
centuries of learning that have brought us to our present understanding of
the world. And they need to learn boundaries, to learn the value of
discipline and a systematic approach.
But I do think we have a system that is out of balance for the times we
live in. A few years ago with some colleagues I edited a book of 50 or 60
essays by people engaged in education around the world. We gave the
book the title ‘Creativity Money and Love’ on the basis that these are
three of the essential elements we all want and need to have a fulfilled
and meaningful life but which, with some honourable exceptions, are not
addressed by the school system at all.
We do not prepare young people for life.
And we are no longer even preparing them for work.
Our school systems are predicated on a narrative that is rapidly becoming
a lie. The narrative is this:- study hard, get good grades and you will go
to a good university or college; study hard and get good grades at college
and you will get a good job: get a good job and you’ll be happy for ever
more.
That simple progression no longer holds true. Already in the UK about a
third of graduates are doing non-professional jobs, often very low-skilled
service jobs, 3 years after graduating. We are asking them to invest
years of their lives in a system that no longer delivers what it promises.
But the answer from the education authorities has not been to examine
the system fundamentally, it has been to reinforce and intensify what is
already there – to cling ever more tightly to a boat that is visibly sinking.
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In the UK our school system has become obsessed with the so-called
STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering, and maths. It is the
same in many other countries and I think it is also to some extent true
here in Denmark. Apparently this is in order to keep us competitive with
the rest of the world. Our system of tests and exams is being intensified
to the point of madness – one Minister suggested we should be testing 3year olds.
Most teachers think this is crazy and protest but, in the end, teachers
teach what they will be judged by – they have to, otherwise they’d be out
of a job.
And as I’m sure some of you will know, in England we are now moving
to what is called the EBacc – the English Baccalaureate – in which
students study 5 subjects to their main GCSE (General Certificate of
Secondary Education) exams that are usually taken in Year 10 – when
they are 15 or 16. The 5 subjects are maths, English, a science, a
language and one of history or geography. They do not include any arts
discipline. There has been a huge outcry against this from teachers,
students, parents and employers.
But the Minster who introduced the EBacc has insisted that
the system requires children to study what she calls five ‘hard’ subjects.
It’s an interesting concept. The assumption is that the arts are not ‘hard’
– they are for the less capable, the less ambitious – they are ‘nice to have’
but not ‘must have’.
And there’s another assumption that underpins that word ‘hard’ and it is
almost that education should be a form of punishment – to be endured by
children, to toughen them up for the grim realties of the real world. Soft
subjects are not just irrelevant – they may almost be counter-productive.
They have no place in the curriculum – they are for leisure time – at least
for some children.
But there is an abundance of hard evidence to show that engagement with
the arts improves concentration, improves ability at maths, enhances
health and well-being, promotes civic engagement, builds selfconfidence, ambition and self-discipline. Apparently this counts for
nothing.
And there is a bizarre paradox. While our Minsters advocate an ever
more rigorous and Spartan a curriculum and a more rigorous regime of
examinations and tests, they also urge all those working in public
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education to look to the private schools that are sprinkled across England
and for which Russian oligarchs and Chinese billionaires pay tens of
thousands of pounds a year for their children to attend. Almost without
exception what marks out the best of our private schools, and they
include many of the top performing schools in the world on any criteria,
is that they provide a magnificently rich offer of arts, music drama, sport,
community engagement, and opportunities for self-expression and selfrealisation. These schools do not regard the arts and creative disciplines
as soft subjects; they regard them as essentials. In fact they are the
selling point that enables them to charge wealthy parents fabulous sums
of money for educating their children.
All of us know in our hearts that in order to be ready for life young
people benefit from balance, variety and stimulus in what they do and
what they learn – things that engage their passions and emotions as well
as their intellect. They need a ‘well-rounded’ education to use a very
traditional phrase. All of us know that – certainly any parent does. So
how have we arrived at an education system which denies that reality in
ever more strident tones?
Again, I am not advocating the abandonment of science or maths or
academic study or exams. But I do believe that in our collective anxiety
about how our economies remain competitive in a globalised system, we
have thrown balance – and common sense – out of the window.
To lose the balance between culture and technology in a world in which
technology is fundamentally changing who we are and how we relate to
each other has huge and dangerous implications for our society and for
each of us as individuals. I want to come back to that in a moment but,
first, what our governments seem to have lost sight of is that far from
making us more globally competitive, this one-dimensional focus poses
immediate dangers for our economies – and for the kind of jobs that are
open to us in the future.
Let me give you a couple of very prosaic examples.
Two years ago our Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK
looked at about 400 small digital media and tech businesses in and
around Brighton, a city on the south coast of England that has become a
major digital hub. The purpose of the research was to identify the
balance of skills from arts and humanities backgrounds, technology
backgrounds and business backgrounds in the management of those
companies. What they found was that companies in which there was a
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genuine balance between these three kinds of skills, and in which the
technologists and the artists treated each other with mutual respect, were
growing on average 3 time faster than companies in which either the
technologist – the ‘tecchies’ as we call them - or the artists – the ‘luvvies’
as we call them - were in the dominant. We shouldn’t be surprised.
A second example. One of the great slogans of the 11th 5-year plan of the
Chinese government was to “move from made in China to designed in
China”. The Chinese government realised that to manufacture products
designed in the rest of the world was never to be at the really profitable
part of the value chain. Their factories in Shenzhen were busily making
iPhones but never earning more than about 6% of the final sale value of
the phone for doing so. Apple, who had designed the phone, were
making 60% of the finals sales value. Apple owned the intellectual
property – the real source of value. And who was responsible for the
success of the iPhone? In very large part it was thanks to the genius of
Jonathan Ive, a British designer who had graduated from the Royal
College of Art in London. The Chinese government is now building
literally hundreds of design schools – at the very same time that the
number of students able to take arts and design GCSE’s in the UK has
dropped by almost 50% in ten years. I know which government I think
has made the right decision.
A final example. Eric Schmidt, the Chairman and CEO of Google,
speaking to an audience of UK television executives 2 or 3 years ago,
complained that we were losing the necessary balance between tecchies
and luvvies to succeed in the 21st century. He put it like this - “The time
when Britain was at its greatest was a time when the men who built
bridges also wrote poetry”. This from the boss of what was at the time
the most valuable company on the planet.
The idea that the arts are too ‘soft’ to merit a place at the heart of our
education systems or our economies is utter nonsense. It always has
been and it always will be.
But - I haven’t completely forgotten that you asked me to talk about the
jobs of tomorrow! Let me try to offer a few observations.
Many studies around the world point to the obvious fact that the more
creative a job is the less it is at risk of automation. The point is well
illustrated by an old joke that no matter how productive musicians may
be they will never be able to play a Bach string quartet with only 3
players.
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Jobs that depend on individual creativity are difficult to replicate,
however sophisticated our algorithms. Jobs that depend on a number of
creative individuals working together are even more difficult to replicate.
Jobs that depend on social and cultural intelligence, that have to weigh
many different factors in coming to decisions, that require an ability to
work together across disciplines – something which is still well beyond
the capacity of our most advance computers – these are jobs that will
continue to require the subtleties and sensitivities of a human mind.
On our UK government definitions, there are more than 2 million jobs –
around 8 million in the EU - which can be described as ‘creative’. More
significantly that sector of the economy is growing almost twice as fast as
the underlying national rate – and has done so consistently for almost two
decades. It is only likely to go on growing. Granted that a high
proportion of them are filled by graduates it is nevertheless the case that
there are more and more jobs at every level of skill. That’s not just true
for the UK, or for Europe.
According to the UN what they call ‘creative and cultural services’ is one
of the fastest growing sectors in every region of the world and in 2015
was worth $2,250 billion. As we move into a more experience based
economy and as the attraction of niche products and niche services
challenges the dominance of mass-produced goods and experiences, the
likelihood is that there will be yet more opportunities for creative jobs
and creative entrepreneurs.
This is not insignificant. Many economists now argue that ‘variety’ is an
important indicator of prosperity and growth and the burgeoning of niche
products and niche markets does exactly that – it delivers variety. The
University of Sheffield in England – Sheffield being a city with a
population of around half a million – discovered that there were 345
different beers on sale in the city – nearly all produced by local microbreweries. People in Sheffield call it “the beer capital of the world” but
nobody else knows that because most of these beers are only sold within
the city limits – they are local creative businesses, brewing benefit for
their creators and improving life for the people of the city.
Another major sector of the economy which is likely to be immune from
the worst impact of robotisation are the jobs that depend on real social
interaction. According to Forbes magazine what they describe as the
“jobs with the brightest future” are in health care, personal care, and
social assistance”. These are also jobs that today command very little
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value in the jobs market but will become increasingly important as our
societies age. This is not just an issue for our societies in the West – it’s
estimated that over the next 30 years China will need an additional 20
million domestic workers of one kind and another as the Maoist ‘one
child’ policy creates a society full of elderly people living alone.
Unsurprisingly, many of these personal care jobs are today seen as
primarily the province of women rather than men, through that is
beginning to change. That highlights an important issue – there are
powerful and negative gender dimension to many longer-term
employment forecasts.
The social consequences for men deprived of the opportunity to take up
what have been seen as traditional male jobs is profound – we’re all well
aware of that. The Director of the Resolution Foundation, a British thinktank, said recently that women have adapted better to workplace changes
in the last 25 years cased by automation. In simple terms they have
responded to the loss of secretarial and clerical jobs by moving up to
higher skilled posts whereas many men who lost manufacturing jobs have
ended up in lower paid and lower-skilled work.
Young working class men in the UK today are earning significantly less
than they would have done a generation ago. That is an unprecedented
situation. Since 1993 there has been a four-fold increase in the number of
men aged 22-35 working part-time in the lowest-paid jobs. Torsten Bell,
the Director of the Resolution Foundation says “Policy makers need to
recognise the frustration that can follow from finding that Britain does
not have the opportunities you had hoped for – or had seen previous
generation enjoy”.
These are some of the angry people who kicked against the world by
voting for Brexit – and the likelihood is there will be many more of them
in all our societies unless, as Torsten Bell says, we address the issue.
And they are some of the angry men who, no doubt, have gone off to
fight with Daesh in Syria and Iraq – the real surprise is that there are not
many more of them.
When I asked a senior UN official what he thought were some of the
biggest problems we face today he immediately replied “spare boys”, by
which he meant the millions of young men around the world who feel
they have no legitimate way of demonstrating who they want to be –
there are no jobs through which they feel able to express their masculinity
and often there are no jobs at all. For some decades, the default job
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opportunity for unemployed men in our western societies has been to
work as a delivery van driver. Well, suppose the world is full of
Google’s driverless vans and there are no jobs for drivers – what then?
This is a huge problem and we’re not addressing it with the urgency it
demands.
The phenomenon of part-time work, with few safeguards and very little
prospect of being able to identify with a role or take pride in it is
growing. The advances won over the last hundred years in Europe by
campaigners, trade unionists and legislators are under threat. It’s vital
that we resist that erosion but it’s also necessary to recognise fundamental
changes in the way the jobs market is working.
At Creative England, the organisation I chair, we occasionally get
investment funds from our own government and from European funds
and one of the outcomes that we are required to demonstrate is how many
full-time jobs that investment will create. That’s fine but it is a measure
of limited value because, really, we don’t generate jobs. We generate
work. I worked for a substantial film company in the UK with a core
staff of about ten but when we were in production our staff numbers rose
to several hundred. That has long been the pattern in the media industries
but it is a pattern that seems likely to spread.
I’m self-employed but I am also a member of several informal
partnerships. We come together to work on particular projects – we
generate work but we don’t in any traditional sense – generate jobs. All
the evidence suggests this style of work is increasing. Some 15% of the
UK workforce now defines itself as self-employed. The reality is that
very often means under-employed or even unemployed but the harsh fact
is that is likely to increase and most of our governments have given little
thought to what this means – in terms of skills training, welfare, even the
simple collection of data that provides relevant information.
I mentioned that at Creative England we generate work rather than jobs.
How this plays out in real communities is very often that the boundary
between work and social engagement is blurred – in other words people
use their skills and networks and resources to pursue their personal
interests and assist their neighbours, as well as to earn their living.
That may sound wonderfully romantic but it has some hard-edged
implications for employment and for communities. There is a growing
emphasis in some cities in the UK to buy the goods and services that the
city authorities need from local suppliers – whether it’s IT systems for the
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local hospital or food for the local school. The evidence is beginning to
show that such an approach can deliver multiple benefits for a community
that cannot only be measured in employment or commercial terms.
Some of you may be familiar with the work of Mohammed Yunus, an
innovative social entrepreneur from Bangladesh who says “If you take a
job you are simply taking it away from someone else. But if you make a
job, you are contributing to growth in the economy.”
Three or four years ago, I was speaking at an event in Oporto in Portugal
to a group of young undergraduates and I asked them what they were
intending to do when they graduated. One of them replied – none of us
are applying for jobs – there are no jobs in Portugal. We’re making our
own jobs. Everyone in the audience agreed. More and more young
people may find themselves facing that situation.
I came to be self-employed in middle life when I had already had a
chance to work out who I was, what I could do, what networks I could
rely on. For young people, thrown straight into such a labour market, the
skills that they need, the self-belief, the need for guidance and advice is
radically different from the kind of advice that is usually offered to young
people looking for a job. Another fundamental change we have, by and
large, failed to address.
These new patterns of working are particularly apparent in the creative
economy but it is evident that they are beginning to spread to other
sectors and, to that extent, they are a harbinger of a new style of work – a
new paradigm if you like. And in the same way that the many European
and American school systems of the 19th and early 20th century reflected
factory work as their paradigm, even though the number of people
working in factories was never more than a minority of the workforce, so
it may be that we should look to the creative industries to help create a
useful paradigm for the way we think about some of the needs the
education system needs to consider in preparing young people for work.
That takes me to another issue I’ve already touched on. History is littered
with utopian visions of a world in which we all work less and have time
to live life to the full. As we know, the reality has been different. The
available work is distributed unevenly, and is rewarded unevenly. The
Bank of America report I referred to earlier states the obvious when it
says “one major risk is the potential for increasing labour market
polarisation, especially for low-paying jobs such as service occupations.”
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And although the current upsurge of interest in the idea of a basic living
wage for everyone, irrespective of their employment circumstances, is
exciting, the history of our own welfare societies of the last half-century
is that to pay people to do nothing may keep them alive but it can be
utterly corrosive of their aspirations and their self-dignity.
The fourth industrial revolution, with its capacity to underpin an economy
that can produce more, demand less and virtually abolish the dangerous
and the dull jobs that so many are still compelled to do opens up the
possibility of a world that until now has only been dreamt of by utopians
and romantics.
Let’s agree it doesn’t look likely but let’s also agree it’s not impossible.
So that brings me to the core of what I want to say. If we want to know
what the jobs of the future may look like we have to start by thinking
about what the citizen of the future might look like.
We call the world of work a ‘jobs market’ as if it operates on simple basis
of supply and demand. But we know that the jobs market is shaped by
social policy and in democratic societies we have slowly been able to
change the way it works by introducing legislation and regulation. All
that is now under threat as online and so-called virtual businesses change
the rules, evading labour regulations and evading tax. As they open the
door to practices and wage levels we thought we had got rid of, more
small employers follow their example. And as more and more businesses
are owned through complex webs of international holding companies and
funded by private equity rather than the traditional range of shareholders
who have a stake in how the business is run, the more difficult it is to
regulate.
Finally, the rise of populist demagogues preaching an easy message of
inclusion while implementing policies that consolidate the power of the
rich at the expense of the poor only intensifies the problem.
If there is not an engaged, informed, confident electorate ready to demand
and enforce rules and standards, then those standards will be decided by
billionaire oligarchs motivated entirely by self-interest – Trump and Putin
show us the way.
Technology opens new horizons for prosperity but it needs the
counterweight of a dynamic culture to reach those horizons. The arts are
the most effective means by which we engage with and energise that
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culture. They allow us to express our own creativity and appreciate the
creativity of others; they provide a mirror for our own lives and a window
through which we can see and understand the lives of others. They
connect the external world with our own internal worlds. They connect
us as individual to the society of those around us.
They are a powerful tool in enabling young people to answer the question
‘Who am I?’ and to be able to make sound judgements about their own
lives, their relationship to others and their relationship to the community
in which they live, whether or not they have a job. They also help each
of us establish a sense of identity, a sense of purpose and meaning that is
not solely a by-product of our employment status. We may not be
“needed” in the words of the Bank of America commentator I mentioned
earlier, but that does not mean we are worthless.
I’ve been reading a book about how we compile national statistics and I
came across this quote from an economist:“Generally, any task that can be measured by the metrics of productivity
– output per hour –is a task we want automation to do. In short,
productivity is for robots. What humans excel at is wasting time,
experimenting, playing, creating and exploring. None of these fare well
under the scrutiny of productivity. That is why science and art are so
hard to fund. But they are also the foundation of long-term growth.”
Whether the 4th Industrial Revolution opens the door to a world of new
opportunities and new, as yet undreamt of jobs, or whether it opens the
door to misery and poverty for millions of people, the simple truth is that
the best way to prepare for it is to focus on giving young people the tools
and confidence they will need to ‘live well in a future that is uncertain’,
to have the power and confidence to shape that future for themselves and
to have the ability - and the desire - to waste time, experiment, play,
create and explore.
ENDS
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